Signal (20 page)

*   *   *

The four of them sat on the hard ground around the improvised fire pit. The wind coming down out of the mountains was chilly, coursing through the shadowy channels of the scrapyard. Dryden found a few short lengths of two-by-four lumber in the back of the Explorer, and set them on the bed of embers. Within a minute they began to blaze.

He also brought the bag with Curtis’s binders in it.

Whitcomb addressed Dryden and Marnie. “You know my name. I’d like to know yours—and how you’ve ended up here.”

Dryden took stock of the man. Dale Whitcomb looked exhausted, though not the same way Claire had. Whitcomb was stressed, not tired. Instead of sleep, he needed half an hour with a punching bag, pounding it until his knuckles were cracked and bleeding. Beyond the frayed nerves, he looked like a decent enough guy. Claire had trusted him; that counted for a lot.

“Fair enough,” Dryden said.

He introduced himself and Marnie, then spoke for ten minutes, covering the basics of what had happened since midnight. Claire’s phone call, the race to the trailer in the Mojave, Claire’s abduction, Curtis’s death. Then Santa Maria, the tower, Marnie.

When Dryden finished, Whitcomb introduced the blond man. His name was Cal Brennan, and he and Whitcomb had known each other for more than thirty years.

“We served together, way back,” Whitcomb said. “Our careers took different paths, but we kept in touch. Brennan’s here because I trust him, and because he can put together the kinds of resources we need, to go after the people we’re up against. I’ve brought him up to speed on everything I know. He hasn’t seen one of these machines in action yet, but … he’s aware of the kind of work I do. We’ll turn this one on and demonstrate it, as soon as we’re done talking.”

Brennan’s gaze kept going to the plastic case that held the machine. It was sitting on the ground between Dryden and Marnie, along with the bag full of binders.

Brennan, fifty years old, give or take, looked like a guy who rarely smiled. There were no laugh lines around his eyes. He looked like a hardass. He was also tanned in a way that suggested he had recently come from someplace even sunnier than California. He had a pair of Oakleys hanging from his shirt collar, their plastic bands scratched to hell as if someone had taken steel wool to them. Dryden had seen that effect before, in places where windblown sand was a constant feature of life. He would have put serious money on Cal Brennan having some connection to the world of private security contractors. He had the look.

Whitcomb turned to Dryden and Marnie. He seemed about to speak but then stopped himself, struck by something. He glanced at the nearby shipping container, its empty doorframe still exposed, and then looked back at Dryden.

“When you first saw me from inside there,” Whitcomb said, “you knew who I was. Had you seen a picture of me somewhere?”

Dryden shook his head.

“Then how did you know?” Whitcomb said.

“Because of the wallet,” Dryden said. “It was missing everything that could identify you in any official way, but it had a movie ticket stub from Cupertino in it. That was strategic, on your part. You knew the Group might get to Curtis, and learn about this meeting. And if they showed up here, you wanted them to find something that made it look like you were dead. Something they’d have to wonder about, at least. Blood on the ground, a wallet with a ticket stub from where you live—the Group would have picked up on that. They know where you live. But if the Group didn’t find this place … if some random person came along instead, and saw the blood and the wallet, and called the cops … you’d never want
them
to tie your name to this location, on some official record. That really would bring the Group straight here. They might have shown up at this place days ago, if the cops found your wallet here today. Right? So that’s why there was a ticket stub and nothing else. Something the Group would associate with you … but the police wouldn’t. Best of both worlds.”

Whitcomb nodded, studying Dryden.

“You’re already looking at this game the way I do,” Whitcomb said. “Chess in four dimensions.”

Something in the way the man said it chilled Dryden, though he tried not to show it. He only nodded, and waited for him to start talking.

*   *   *

“The way Claire understood it,” Whitcomb said, “and the way she explained it to you, this technology was discovered by a fluke. Bayliss Labs stumbled onto it without any idea what they were looking for. Right?”

Dryden nodded.

Whitcomb leaned over the improvised fire pit, holding his hands out to the heat. “It wasn’t a fluke,” he said. “It wasn’t
just
a fluke. My people at Bayliss may have stumbled onto the design, but they were being pushed toward it. They were looking for it without knowing it.”

Dryden traded a glance with Marnie, then looked at Whitcomb again and waited for him to go on.

“I need to start a little further back,” the man said. “Actually a lot further back, but it won’t take long. Please bear with me.”

Far away to the west, in the wooded foothills rising above the scrapyard, a crow screamed and took to the air. Dryden turned and saw it, a tiny speck of black against the early afternoon sky.

“My father served in World War II,” Whitcomb said, “in North Africa and Europe. He landed in Morocco under Patton, November 1942. My dad was infantry, but a few weeks into the invasion he was transferred to a group under the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, which was military intelligence. He had a background they liked: radio engineering, pretty advanced work at Stanford before the war. OSS had a job for him right away. Scout planes had seen something out in the desert in northern Algeria, some small German installation, all by itself in the middle of nowhere. Someone up the chain wanted to know what the hell it was, so my dad and his guys went in with a commando unit. The Germans defending that site must have thought it was pretty important, because they fought to the last man. When my father and his team finally got in to look at the place, they found most of it demolished. But not all of it. From what they could see, it had been some type of research station. There was one machine in particular that seemed to be the main event. A great big thing, the size of a pool table, with cables running out to speakers beside it. A radio of some kind, they thought. Its power supply had been cut, and someone had put a few bullets through its casing, but nothing vital had been hit. They got it powered up and switched it on, but at first all they heard was static. Then, every so often, they’d hear radio traffic coming through. Mostly it was music, sung in local languages, like what they’d heard on the streets in Moroccan towns. It was strange as hell to hear that stuff being broadcast on the radio, though, in German-occupied North Africa.”

A knot in one of the two-by-fours popped in the firepit, sending an ember arcing out onto the dirt beside Whitcomb. He hardly seemed to notice.

“My father and his people only had control of that site for a day before word came that heavier German forces were en route. Other teams from OSS had arrived by then. They boxed up all the paperwork they could salvage and carted it off, but the equipment itself was too heavy to move on short notice. The commando unit rigged everything with high explosives, including the big machine with the speakers. They blew it all to scraps, and then everyone got out of there. In those hours that my father had been able to listen to the machine, and the static, he only heard one thing he could actually make sense of. One thing in English: the chorus of a song apparently titled ‘She Loves You.’ He heard those three words and then the word
yeah
repeating a few times before he lost the signal.”

Dryden had been staring down into the flames. His gaze snapped up now, meeting Whitcomb’s. Beside him, Marnie did the same.

Whitcomb nodded. “He heard that in the desert in North Africa, in 1942. At the time, he had no reason to think it was anything strange. Just some song he wasn’t familiar with. How it was being broadcast in Algeria, he couldn’t imagine. Maybe someone was transmitting English music out of occupied France. Maybe the machine could pull in signals from that far out, all the way across the Mediterranean. Or farther. Maybe Britain.”

Whitcomb took hold of a two-by-four sticking out of the tire rim on his side. He used it like a poker, prodding at the bed of coals below.

“I saw for myself the moment it hit him,” he said. “I remember the date. February 9, 1964. I was ten years old. I guess just about anyone my age remembers the Beatles on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
but it’s not the show itself I remember now. What I remember is my dad getting up off the couch, his expression like I’d never seen it before. I remember him going into the kitchen and splashing water on his face, and my mom asking him what was wrong, and I remember that he couldn’t answer her. He went up in the attic and got out some old boxes of his stuff from the war. Journals he’d kept at the time. In 1964, he was still in the military. Still working in intelligence. I remember him putting his coat on, after he came back downstairs, and saying he had to go to work. And then he left, and I didn’t see him again for weeks.”

Whitcomb set aside the two-by-four and went on. “I learned the whole story years later, when I was in military intel myself, and working with him. In the days after that television broadcast, my father tracked down some of the former OSS men who’d been with him in North Africa. Men who’d gone to that site. Together they got clearance to dig into the old paperwork that had been found there, and even to lead an expedition out to that spot in the Sahara where the site had been. They didn’t find much there. They had better luck with the boxes of papers, which were lab notes by the Germans who’d built that machine, in 1942. But the notes were incomplete. Most of them had been burned before the American commandos secured the site. What was left was … frustrating. Like a treasure map missing half the route, including the
X
to mark the spot.”

“The U.S. military wanted to build their own version of that machine?” Dryden asked. “If they could figure it out?”

Whitcomb nodded. “But there was more to it than that. Think of all the questions they had to consider. Had those few Germans out in the desert really been the only ones who knew about this technology, or did others know? If there were others, what happened to them? When the U.S. and Russia divided up Nazi scientists after the war, like battle spoils, could the Russians have gotten someone who knew how to build one of those machines? In 1964, when my father and his colleagues started digging into this, the Cold War was pretty close to its worst days. It was like the whole government ran on paranoia. There were serious incentives to look into this matter. But … there was also no proof any of it was true. Just my father’s say-so, versus all common sense. The one bit of evidence he had was his journal from the North Africa campaign; he’d actually written that Beatles line in it. In ’64, the military went as far as running chemical analysis on the ink he’d used to write it, and they determined it was a hell of a lot older than the song ‘She Loves You.’ I think that test bought my father and his friends more credibility than anything else, but only to a point. Try looking at it from the military’s perspective, back then. What’s the more likely explanation? That an intel officer really heard a message from the future, back in 1942, or that he found a way to make ink that could fuck with the chemical tests? What would you believe?”

Marnie said, “So what happened?”

“A half measure,” Whitcomb said. “The military analyzed the paperwork from that site and pulled from it everything they could make sense of. Everything that offered a hint of how the machine might have worked. They weren’t willing to spend money on trying to build another one; there had to be a million ways to interpret those technical notes. A million different machines you could build, on the off chance one would be the right one. If there
was
a right one. If the whole thing wasn’t a fantasy.”

“So what was the half measure?” Dryden said.

“Sitting back and watching. Watching the world, and watching new communication technologies emerge naturally, over the decades. Scrutinizing the details, seeing if some new field of work started to look oddly familiar—along the lines of those old German tech notes. I’ve always thought it was a smart approach. Whether the Germans back then just made a shot in the dark, or even if they had some equivalent of a Nikola Tesla, way ahead of his time, it stood to reason someone else would eventually discover the same technology again. We figured by watching closely enough, we might actually see it coming. Some project at a place like MIT or Caltech might be stumbling in the right direction and not even realize it … but we would. For that matter, we could give them a little push now and then, this way or that way, based on the notes from 1942. Like that kids’ game, warmer or colder, only they wouldn’t know they were playing it. That’s how I ended up at Bayliss Labs. Their work with neutrinos, starting a few years back … the devices they were building … it was uncanny how well they matched those old notes. They were on the right track without knowing it. Once I became head of the company, I was able to give them a few nudges. Educated guesses that were more educated than I let on. Like I said, the end result wasn’t a fluke. Not just a fluke, anyway.”

“So the military knows what Bayliss created,” Marnie said. “If they sent you to oversee it—”

Whitcomb shook his head. “They sent me to try. I never told them I succeeded. When the damn thing finally worked, my reaction was genuine. It scared the hell out of me. I could see then how dangerous it could be, and what people would do to get control of it. The approach Claire told you about—my putting together a list of powerful people I trusted—that was all I could think of. At the time, I wasn’t seeing it in terms of destroying the thing, disinventing it. I just wanted to get it into safe hands. I thought that was possible, then. I don’t anymore. This technology needs to disappear. If we’re lucky, it’ll be another half a century before someone else invents it. Maybe the world will be readier for it by then.”